How AI, Mixed Reality and Quantum Computing will Reshape your life!

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, was interviewed by a team of India Today Group editors, consisting of Raj Chengappa, Prosenjit Datta and Sanghamitra Chakraborty, at his office in Seattle, USA. 

- Raj Chengappa, Prosenjit Datta And Sanghamitra Chakraborty

It is brave of you to write a book in the midst of being the CEO—in the fog of war, as you call it. Normally CEOs wait for their successes and years later talk about it. So why did you do it?

SATYA NADELLA: The impetus for the book came from not as much trying to recount what has happened or even just talk about the future, but to talk about the process of transformation. Because I realised that so much of what one does as a leader in any context—and also what one does in life as you live it—is deal with change. So, I felt that reflecting on that while you’re going through it is, in fact, cathartic and clarifying, rather than do one of those exposed ‘look-backs’.

One of the inspirations for this was a meeting with Steve (Ballmer, Nadella’s predecessor) maybe six months after he left. When I asked him, “Hey, are you writing a book?”, he had a fantastic answer. He said, “No, it’s too boring to look back into the past.” And that’s when it struck me—right now, while I’m in the midst of it. By no stretch am I claiming the journey is done, the transformation is finished or any successes have been achieved. But, I thought, let me reflect on Microsoft’s own journey, the moments of transformation, and then our own society. And so that’s the three stanzas that were really the impetus for it.

ITG: You talk of the soul of Microsoft and ask existential questions in the book. Isn’t that somewhat of an Indian thing to do?